Quiet Color

by chuck bell

[Quick editor's note: Dead Bands is a column in recognition of bands no longer with us. Chuck Bell will tell the tale of these bands which endured varying levels of success but failed to persevere as a unit.]

Maintaining a band is very much like maintaining a relationship – especially when there are only two people involved. From the outset, Death from Above 1979 seemed too good to be true, and as it turns out, they were. DFA1979 consisted of Jesse F. Keeler on bass/synths and Sebastian Grainger on vocals/drums. In the sea of two-member rock outfits that were popping up in the early 2000s, they stood out in many ways. Even though they had no guitars, they were able to shred harder than any band on the indie rock scene. Keeler’s chunky bass lines somehow managed to channel Kyuss and Daft Punk at the same time, while Grainger wailed and moaned, frantically pounding the drums simultaneously. They were perfect complements to each other. Unfortunately, they were only in sync with each other for one EP and a single full-length.

Artist: Death from Above 1979 Song: Little Girl (MSTRKRFT Edition)

Artist: Death from Above 1979 Song: Black History Month

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Keeler and Grainger released their first EP, Heads Up, in 2002, and were eventually signed to Vice Records. At this point, they were still known as Death From Above, until LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy took legal action against them. His label, DFA Records, claimed that they had license to the name. The band’s response was to add the minimum amount of characters legally required of them, so they landed on 1979. However, this did not sit well with DFA1979, as you could see on their Web site at the time, which literally declared a jihad on Murphy, saying, “If I had the resources, I would fly a plane into his skull,” among many other things.

With their new moniker, DFA1979 released what would be their only proper LP, You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine. The album starts with a screeching synth line, and once the drums and bass come in, it never stops. Grainger’s alternatingly sweet and sexual lyrics stand in stark contrast to the sheer brutality of their instrumentals. In “Romantic Rights,” he talks about wanting to settle down and start a family, while in “Pull Out”….well, you can figure that one out for yourself. This album, along with their infamy as a two-man wrecking crew onstage, launched them into the hype machine full force. It seemed that every hipster you ran into was talking about them. After their tour ended, they released a remix album, Romance Bloody Romance, featuring remixes by a wide range of artists, including Justice and Queens of the Stone Age singer, Josh Homme.

This was the last that anyone would hear from DFA1979. By 2006, it had been over a year since the remix album dropped, and they were still nowhere to be found. On August 4th, 2006, Keeler announced on their Web site that the band had been broken up since the end of their last tour. He said that they parted ways because of creative differences. While it is unfortunate that they had such limited productivity with DFA1979, their current projects reveal the fact that they were headed in two entirely different directions. Today, Keeler is one-half of MSTRKFT, the Canadian hipster answer to Daft Punk. Grainger is playing decidedly softer indie rock with his backup band, the Mountains, who recently signed with Saddle Creek Records.

Though we may never hear from Death from Above 1979 again, you can still catch little slivers of their music around if you listen hard enough. You can hear the opening riff to “Romantic Rights” in the credits for MTV2’s sketch comedy show, Human Giant. The MSTRKRFT remix of “Sexy Results” was briefly in a commercial for the Motorola Q. Even atari-clash upstarts Crystal Castles lifted the opening synth line from “Dead Womb” as the verse to their track, “Untrust Us.”